BORROWED CULTURE
The new editor-in-chief of The Walrus, Jonathan Kay, wrote recently that Canada seemed at last to have shuffled off its insecurity about the United States, as the politics of both countries shifted. “The gun-nut hysteria of the Tea Party movement profoundly alienated mainstream Canadian right-wingers,” wrote Kay. “In the Harper era, Canadian conservatism has become very much its own thing.” He may have spoken too soon. The prime minister suggested recently not only that Canadians should be able to own guns (fair enough), but that they might be wise to have them in the home. “My wife’s from a rural area and obviously gun ownership wasn’t just for the farm, but was for a certain level of security when you’re a ways away from immediate police assistance.”
The idea that guns in the home give people “a certain level of security” may be standard in American political debates but it is a new argument from the mainstream Canadian right. It’s also utterly false. A recent survey of studies by David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, found that “the evidence does not indicate that having a gun reduces the risk of being a victim of a crime or that having a gun reduces the risk of injury during the commission of a crime.” Overall, “the health risk of a gun in the home is greater than the benefit.”
Stephen Harper’s comment is a head-scratcher, because there hasn’t been a debate in Canada about whether people should be encouraged to have guns in their homes. It just hasn’t come up. So far, the gun debate in Canada has been about balancing public safety and the rights of gun owners without undue red tape, about which guns should be allowed and who ought to be allowed to have them. It has been an argument framed in libertarian terms (at what point should individual rights be curtailed?) rather than a moral argument (what is the best way to live?) As with the niqab debate — manufactured over the question of what a vanishingly tiny minority of citizenship applicants might wear at a ceremony — the Canadian conservative approach is shifting from the first to the second.
And that re-framing inevitably shapes the response; columnist William Watson sees “American-style” “nationalistic bombast and provincialism” in Justin Trudeau’s countering of the Conservative approach.
The strangest thing about Harper’s gun remarks is not that the Conservatives are trying to stir up a moral debate but that they’re importing one, as a way to fire up the base. Surely, if this country is grown up enough to have its own culture, it’s grown up enough to have its own culture wars.